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Life in the Licensing Compliance Lab

Initially, the Free Software Foundation staff wrote software for the
GNU operating system. Since the early 1990s, much of this work has
been done by non-FSF staff, thanks to the increasing popularity of
GNU. Some of our work has then shifted to writing and maintaining the
GNU General Public License (GPL), a copyright license which protects
free software by allowing people to run, modify and copy software, but
on the condition that anyone else receiving the software have the same
rights. The FSF's Free Software Licensing and Compliance Lab works to
protect these rights, and to help update the GNU licenses when needed
to deal with the ever-changing free software landscape.

The past few months have been exciting ones for us in the Lab. Just
reviewing the news from the past few months demonstrates how we work
on many different fronts to protect software freedom for everyone.

Shortly after we published our last Bulletin, we settled the lawsuit
we had brought against Cisco over their violations of various free
software licenses. As part of that agreement, Cisco appointed a Free
Software Director for its Linksys subsidiary to oversee the company's
compliance work. It also took various steps to notify its previous
customers that they had the right to share and change some of the
software they received. That finally put an end to a case that had
been open for more than five years.

Adoption of GPLv3 and the Lesser GNU General Public License version 3
(LGPLv3) continues apace--we've even handled a couple of compliance
cases that involved GPLv3-covered software. Most GNU projects have had
multiple releases under the latest licenses now. The few that haven't
generally need new exception text, and we've been working on getting
those updated, slowly but surely. We released new exception text for
Autoconf in August, and we're still drafting more.

In September, we filed an amicus curiae brief in The Authors Guild,
Inc., et al. v. Google Inc.--more colloquially known as the "Google
Book Search case." This case began when a group of authors sued Google
for scanning books for their Google Book Search product, alleging that
such use infringed their copyrights. As the case progressed, the
parties proposed a wide-reaching class action settlement that would
generally grant Google permission to display and sell all
books--including out-of-print works and orphan works whose copyright
holders can't be found--under the condition that they pay royalties to
the authors, who can opt out of the program if they wish. One
consequence of the settlement that was proposed was that it would
grant Google permission to publish works released under the GNU Free
Documentation License, and other copyleft licenses, without following
those licenses' terms. They would not have to provide the work in a
form that people could modify; they could distribute the work wrapped
in a Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) format if they wished; and
more. All they would need to do is pay royalties to the authors. We
suggested to the Court that the settlement would do better to require
license compliance when the work is already free, rather than royalty
payments. Since then, the parties in the case have announced that they
are working on a revised settlement, which hasn't been released yet.
We're still following this case, and hopeful that the negotiating
parties will take our suggestions into account.

And of course, there's still all the work that goes on behind the
scenes. In order to pursue violations, we need to stay on top of our
copyright assignments and registrations. Donald Robertson, our
copyright administrator, has been working to beef up our registration
process to make sure that we're always on completely solid legal
ground when we handle these cases. We continue to resolve most
violations cooperatively, and work to raise awareness about the
licenses' requirements.

As the stewards for some of the most popular licenses in the free
software community, and legal guardian for the GNU Project, we have
unique opportunities to educate people about free software and make
sure that others respect the terms of our licenses. Your support
makes it possible for us to do that work.

You can find out more about the FSF Free Software Licensing and
Compliance Lab at its website, and questions
about our licenses can be sent to licensing@fsf.org. Brett,
Donald and the licensing volunteers also have a blog, and are always on the lookout for
interns interested in licensing.